Can you believe that there are at least three statues of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington DC? There is one in South Dakota too, another in Virginia, and even more in London.

It appears all these places are overrun by racists and fascist sympathizers. How can people celebrate a man who:

1. Literally Rounded Up 120,000 Japanese Americans, and put them in Concentration Camps.

Executive order 9066 authorized the arrest and detention, without charges, or American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law on February 19, 1942.

Two reports which Roosevelt commissioned in the years prior to their internment found that Japanese Americans posed little to no risk to the government. But FDR ignored the reports’ recommendations.

70,000 of those arrested and detained, sometimes for years, were American citizens. And a simple executive order allowed them to be arrested for no reason other than their race and nationality.

How is this fact so often left out of any discussion about how “great” FDR was? How is he not widely accepted as the biggest American racist of the last century?

2. FDR Outlawed Private Ownership of Gold.

With Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, everyone living in America was given 25 days to turn in their gold. Their property–gold coins and bullion–was confiscated without due process.

The government paid about $20 per ounce for the gold they forced citizens to “sell” them. Three months later, the price miraculously jumped to $35 per ounce. (Today the price of an ounce of gold is over $1,700. But inflation, the gold standard, and the Federal Reserve is another whole story.)

The law wasn’t repealed until 1974. Only then was private ownership of gold once again legal.

3. FDR was Pen Pals With Mussolini, Whom he Admired.

It was a mutual love between FDR and Mussolini. Benito Mussolini was the fascist Italian Dictator in league with Hitler during World War II.

In one sketchy encounter, soldiers were told to stand down when they witnessed American secrets being smuggled out of America on a plane bound for Russia, guarded by Soviet soldiers. This may be how the Soviet Union was able to make nuclear weapons.

Many other policies were directly influenced by socialist sympathizers and possibly outright spies in the government during FDR’s tenure. For instance, Soviet troops were given precedence for American supplies over American troops during World War II through the “Lend-Lease” program.

5. FDR Hated the Press and Suppressed Free Speech.

Reason Magazine describes FDR’s War Against the Press:

Roosevelt warned in 1938 that “our newspapers cannot be edited in the interests of the general public, from the counting room. And I wish we could have a national symposium on that question, particularly in relation to the freedom of the press. How many bogies are conjured up by invoking that greatly overworked phrase?”

He’s basically saying he wishes he could shut down “fake news”.

Roosevelt also started the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and limited radio licenses for radio to six months so that the government could revoke a license, and silence those who criticized FDR’s government.

It did not take long for broadcasters to get the message. NBC, for example, announced that it was limiting broadcasts “contrary to the policies of the United States government.” CBS Vice President Henry A. Bellows said that “no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration.” He elaborated “that the Columbia system was at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration and they would permit no broadcast that did not have his approval.” Local station owners and network executives alike took it for granted, as Editor and Publisher observed, that each station had “to dance to Government tunes because it is under Government license.”

FDR’s government illegally intercepted telegraphs and used the ill-begotten information to subpoena journalists, chilling any decent, and drying up the flow of information to reporters. A law was even proposed to give prison sentences to anyone who knowingly published fake news.